As much as I sympathize with football fans who were upset by SingTel’s mioTV epic failure during the epic EPL season finale, I’m glad I don’t watch football. I would otherwise have been completely infuriated and spent the following week organizing a campaign against SingTel. This is a colossal engineering failure.
Surely SingTel knew the number of subscribers they had on mioTV. I think most subscribers are on mioTV only because of the football programmes. Otherwise they would probably find better programming offered by StarHub.
But never mind that, surely they know how many are signed up on the sports package. These are diehard fans who probably switched over to mioTV because of football, and surely you know they are going to tune in to the season finale. So, isn’t it quite plain obvious what kind of viewing load the mioTV network will experience?
So, on Monday, SingTel apologized. The problem with the way apologies work in Singapore is that, well, they are not sincere, and in same breadth, so to speak, they attribute blame to someone else. In SingTel’s statement, they blamed the disruption on an “unprecedented number of viewers”. Yah. People who were forced to switch to mioTV, paid for a football contract, are not expected to tune in to the season finale?
Then, in a so-called goodwill gesture that, I’m sure, does nothing more than further insult affected subscribers, they plan to waive one-month of subscription fees? Do you seriously think one-month subscription fees will make up for the failure on Sunday night?
I think the least SingTel should do is to return all the monies paid by all affected subscribers, and continue to offer them free subscription for as long as they can deliver a problem-free season.
MDA, please stop imposing silly $50K fines. Do you know how much SingTel mioTV collects from its subscribers?
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